Converged Infrastructure Comparison

Users Cases

These types of storage solutions are well suited for any workload that requires Webscale/rapid Scale-out or horizontal scale, such as ; BUSINESS CENTRIC, SMB 10-20 VMs. LOB / Business Critical Applications (BCAs), VDI, Test/Dev, DMZ, Small Projects, Small Sites or Remote Branch Sites..(Application Scale-Out – I would add High performance Applications that require a spot solutions rather than shared infrastructure.)

Its very important to understand that these scale out solutions can’t replace existing SANs providing FC, NFS or CIFS.. example; Nutanix can not provide CIFS. NetApp provides CIFS natively to windows environments for Windows file share.

Benefits include:

Improving resiliency / performance

Simplifying storage management for

Freeing up capacity and reducing the workload on legacy SAN

Increasing ease of scalability for critical workloads

Use legacy SAN/NAS for high capacity low IOPS workloads which are better suited to centralized storage

Separating non complimentary VDI workloads from Server & vBCAs as these workloads do not mix well in centralized storage deployments

Reducing the workload on legacy SAN/NAS which will give an effective increase in performance for workloads remaining on the SAN/NAS

These Scale out solutions are perfect for issues with Traditional SANs:

SERVER ARCHITECTURE

STORAGE ARCHITECTURE

WebScale IT

Nutanix

Nutanix is a very interesting solution as it combines Compute and Storage in to a single platform. They have integration with other hardware vendors. Atm, it is only Dell. I hope they will start to support enterprise hardware vendors like, Lennov, HP and SuperMicro. PS: If you want to buy dell server, go ahead and just buy ASUS Servers.. !!!

Native CIFS is not provided. This is a huge problem for Nutanix and I hope they will resolve this in future features.

Nutanix hardware platforms are very expensive. The advantage is the ability for Rapid Webscale-IT with little engineering costs. Minimising Non-recurring engineering costs. Nutanix also provide on tested hardware platform.